Paula Poundstone covets an audience

Friday

Don’t expect Paula Poundstone to cede the stage to anyone. She spent too many years vying with other rising comics each night for a few precious minutes on her own.

“Now I do two hours, and I don’t let anybody else on the stage. I don’t want to share — I have the best audience in the world,” Poundstone says.

She’ll be bringing her brand of wry, spontaneous, observational humor to Provincetown Town Hall on Saturday. And though Provincetown has long been a regular stop on Poundstone’s seemingly endless tour, she hasn’t been here in a couple of years, and she says she’s looking forward to performing in Town Hall since its renovation.

“Last time, when it was still shakily standing, there was no dressing room area,” she says. “You just waited where [town officials] have their meetings. So I used their white board and wrote an agenda for them. I don’t know if they ever went over it.”

Poundstone, who grew up in Sudbury, says she wanted to be a comedian “ever since I can remember. I wanted to be Lily Tomlin and Gilda Radner and Mary Tyler Moore and Lucille Ball. I missed by a country mile. It was serendipitous luck that I was living in Boston in the ’80s, when the comedy scene exploded, not just in Boston but around the country. I have no idea why. It just happened.”

The Boston stand-up scene was “not friendly to female comics,” Poundstone says. She found her voice in late-’80s San Francisco, honing her autobiographical, improvisational style in that city’s comedy clubs.

“Engagement with the audience is the best part,” she says. “In the beginning, I tried to memorize everything I was going to say, because I only had so much time. Then it dawned on me that the stuff I didn’t intend to say was more effective than the stuff that I did intend to say, so I started allowing myself more and more to go off script … It’s really where the heart and soul of the night is. You make connections to people in the room and, 39 years later, it’s still working.”

So is Poundstone — at 58, one of the hardest-working women in show business, with a résumé that spans books, films, comedy specials and TV appearances. For 17 years, she’s been a popular panelist on NPR’s comedy news quiz, “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” and she recently launched a new weekly podcast, “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone,” with her friend Adam Felber (“one of the sharpest comic minds I know,” she says), who is a fellow panelist on “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!”

Still, the live stage is where Poundstone feels most at home.

“I’m very lucky — people come out to laugh for the night,” she says. “We can use the sustenance that comes with laughter. It’s such a dark time, and I have a bad feeling that things are only going to get darker.”

Though Poundstone provided coverage of the 1992 Democratic and Republican conventions for “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” overt political humor isn’t her style. But she still makes observations about the current state of the world.

“I have spent the last couple of years trying to understand what we’re doing and why and articulate it. A couple of weeks ago, I rushed to Twitter to say, ‘I got it!’ I think electing Trump is to America what beaching themselves is to whales. Because there is no explanation that anyone can come up with. And it’s gonna kill us. But the difference is, we don’t have another species that can shove us back into the water. Whales, at least, have us.”

Poundstone won’t spend much time in in town, since, as usual, the next gig beckons. “The good news is that it is such a joyous experience for me,” she says of touring. “I’ve gone onstage in every form of personal duress there is. And whenever I think, ‘I’m just going to get through this — I’m just doing my job,’ every single time, unfailingly, I’ve come offstage saying, ‘Wow, that was great!’ It’s more than shared laughter. It’s the shared community. It’s so important. I don’t know why, as a species, we get to have that. But I wouldn’t trade it — it’s better than smelling one another’s butts. We did luck out as a species.”